Read complete books and articles on: Honore de Balzac

Balzac, HonorÉ De - bălˈzăk, bôl–, Fr. ōnôrāˈ də bälzäkˈ, 1799–1850, French novelist, b. Tours. Balzac ranks among the great masters of the novel. Of a bourgeois family, he himself later added the "de" to his name. Neglected in childhood, he was sent to a grammar school at Tours and later to a boarding school at Vendôme, where he was a dull student but a voracious reader. In 1816 he began studying law at the Sorbonne, but after receiving his license in 1819 he decided to abandon law for literature. Half starving in a Paris garret, Balzac began writing sensational novels to order, publishing them under a pseudonym. Throughout his life he worked with feverish activity, sleeping a few hours in the evening and writing from midnight until noon or afternoon of the next day. He was ridden with debts, which were increased rather than relieved by his business ventures. Balzac's first success, Les Chouans (1829, first published as Le Dernier Chouan), was followed by La Peau de chagrin (1831). In the next 20 years he produced the vast collection of novels and short stories called "La Comédie humaine." This, his greatest work, is a reproduction of the French society of his time, picturing in precise detail more than 2,000 characters from every class and every profession. The chief novels in "La Comédie humaine" are Louis Lambert (1832), Eugénie Grandet (1833), La Recherche de l'absolu (1834), Le Père Goriot (1835), Les Illusions perdues (1837), César Birotteau (1837), La Cousine Bette (1847), and Le Cousin Pons (1847). Outweighing Balzac's faults—his lack of literary style, his moralizing, his tendency toward melodrama—are his originality, his great powers of observation, and his vivid imagination. His short stories include some of the best in the language, but his attempts at drama failed. Though an unattractive, awkward man, Balzac formed several famous liaisons. Only a few months before his death he married the Polish Countess Evelina Hanska, with whom he had conducted a romantic correspondence for 18 years.

See The Human Comedy (with introductions by G. Saintsbury, 40 vol., 1895–98); Balzac's Letters to His Family, 1809–1850 (ed. by W. S. Hastings, 1934); biographies by H. J. Hunt (1957, repr. 1969), A. Maurois (1966, repr. 1983), and G. Robb (1994); studies by C. Prendergast (1979) and R. Butler (1983); bibliography and index comp. by W. H. Royce (1929, repr. 1969).

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16 of the Best Books and Articles on: Honore de Balzac

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Balzac and the Human Comedy » Read Now
by Philippe Bertault, Richard Monges. 212 pgs.

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2.

Balzac: A Life » Read Now
by Graham Robb. 521 pgs.

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In the first major English biography of Honore de Balzac in over 50 years, Graham Robb has produced a compelling portrait of the great French novelist whose powers of creation were matched only by his self-destructive tendencies. Robb presents Balzac as a man whose influence both in and outside his native France has been, and is still, immense.
3.

Louis Lambert » Read Now
by Honore de Balzac, Katharine Prescott Wormeley. 330 pgs.

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4.

Eugenie Grandet » Read Now
by Honore de Balzac, Sylvia Raphael. 200 pgs.

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5.

Pere Goriot » Read Now
by Honore de Balzac, A. J. Krailsheimer. 274 pgs.

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...This fine example of the French realist novel contrasts the social progress of an impoverished but ambitious aristocrat with the tale of a father, whose obsessive love for...
6.

Lost Illusions » Read Now
by Honore de Balzac, Katharine Prescott Wormeley. 420 pgs.

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7.

Cousin Bette » Read Now
by Honore de Balzac, Sylvia Raphael. 490 pgs.

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...Cousin Bette (1846), long considered Balzac's last great novel, is a key work in his Comedie humaine. Grounded in a meticulous documentation of contemporary France, this...
8.

Le Cousin Pons » Read Now
by Honore de Balzac, Katharine Prescott Wormeley. 426 pgs.

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9.

The Golden Scapegoat: Portrait of the Jew in the Novels of Balzac » Read Now
by Frances Schlamowitz Grodzinsky. 91 pgs.

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10.

The Unheroic Hero in the Novels of Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert » Read Now
by Raymond Giraud. 248 pgs.

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11.

The Novel in France: Mme de la Fayette, Laclos, Constant, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust » Read Now
by Martin Turnell. 432 pgs.

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12.

Overtones: A Book of Temperaments: Richard Strauss, Parsifal, Verdi, Balzac, Flaubert, Nietzsche, and Turgenieff » Read Now
by James Huneker. 339 pgs.

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13.

Short Fiction in France, 1800-1850 (Chap. IV "Stendhal, Balzac, and Merimee") » Read Now
by Albert J. George. 248 pgs.

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14.

Circumstances: Chance in the Literary Text (Chap. 3 "The Demon, the Police, and Cacophony in Balzac" and Chap. 4 "Balzac's Gamblers") » Read Now
by David F. Bell. 240 pgs.

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15.

Fiction Rivals Science: The French Novel from Balzac to Proust (Chap. Two "Balzac and the Unity of Knowledge") » Read Now
by Allen Thiher. 226 pgs.

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In Fiction Rivals Science, Allen Thiher describes the epistemic rivalry that the major nineteenth-century French novelists felt in dealing with science. After brief considerations of Stendhal, Thiher focuses on the four most important "realist" novelists in France: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and, going...
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In Fiction Rivals Science, Allen Thiher describes the epistemic rivalry that the major nineteenth-century French novelists felt in dealing with science. After brief considerations of Stendhal, Thiher focuses on the four most important "realist" novelists in France: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and, going into the twentieth century, Proust. According to Thiher, each of these novelists considered himself to be in competition with science to make the novel an instrument for knowledge.
The first chapter sets forth the understanding of science that dominated the early nineteenth century in order to make it plausible that literary minds, throughout the nineteenth century, thought that they could not only rival science, but even make positive contributions to knowledge. The Newtonian paradigm that had dominated the Enlightenment was slowly being challenged by new developments both in physics and in nonphysical sciences such as biology. Especially in biology the development of a scientific discourse using narrative temporality favored the idea that novelists could also use fiction to construct discourses that advanced knowledge.
Balzac wanted to construct a natural history of society and correct the chemical theory of his time. Flaubert drew upon medicine and physiology for the rhetoric of his realist fiction. Zola used unsuccessful medical paradigms for his doctrine of heredity, and models drawn from thermodynamics to describe the relation of the individual to societal forces. Finally, Proust drew upon thinkers such as Poincare to elaborate an epistemology that put an end to the rivalry novelists might feel with scientists. Proust located certain knowledge within the realm of human subjectivitywhile granting the power of laws to rule over the contingent realm of physical reality, in which, after Poincare, neither mathematics nor Newton was any longer a source of absolute certainty. Proust's novel is thus the last
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16.

The Naturalist in Balzac: The Relative Influence of Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, in French Forum » Read Now
by Richard Somerset. 31 pgs.

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